Cry ptomeria 133 



tree of Japan, as it is also the largest, and though it is now difficult to say how far its 

 natural distribution extends, it has been planted everywhere from such a remote 

 period, and grows so rapidly that it is now the most conspicuous tree in all those parts 

 of Japan which I visited except in the island of Hokkaido.^ 



I saw it wild in the primeval forests which cover the mountains on the frontier 

 of the provinces of Akita and Aomori in the extreme north, near a station called 

 Jimba, at an elevation of about looo feet, where the lower edge of the forests and 

 more accessible valleys have already been denuded of their best timber. The 

 Japanese Government have lately made a good road up one of the valleys, which 

 enabled me to see the forest at its best under the guidance of their obliging foresters. 

 The hills are here very steep, often with a slope of 30 to 40, and covered on the 

 north-east aspects with an almost pure growth of Cryptomeria, and though on the 

 south-west aspects a few deciduous trees, such as maple, magnolia, oak, chestnut, and 

 ^sculus were mixed with it, I saw no other conifer. This forest is not truly virgin, 

 because from time to time trees have been cut for shingles and tub staves, which 

 are made in the forest and carried out on men's backs as usual in the remoter parts 

 of Japan. But in many places it was quite dense, and the undergrowth consisted 

 largely of ferns, Aucuba, Skimmia, Hydrangea, and a variety of other shrubs, and 

 tall, rank-growing herbaceous plants such as Spiraea and Rodgersia podophylla. 



The trees average in size 100 to no feet high by 2 to 3 feet in diameter, and are 

 clean for half their length or more, in the denser parts of the forest. The largest trees 

 which have been felled here do not exceed about 100 feet in timber length and about 

 4 feet diameter. The rings of one of 5 feet in girth which I measured showed 116 

 years' growth, of which about 87 were red heart-wood. Another close by was very 

 flat-sided, measuring 3 feet 9 inches in diameter one way, and only 2 feet 9 inches 

 the other, the centre on that side being only i foot from the nearest point of the bark. 

 This tree was about 136 years old, over 100 years growth being red heart-wood. 



Many trees were more or less curved at the butt, and many others forked low 

 down into two, three, or more stems. There were plenty of cones on the trees which 

 had sufficient light, but a careful search did not discover a single self-sown seedling, 

 all the young trees which were coming up and those not numerous being evidently 

 suckers or growths from the stool. The dense layer of coarse, sour humus and half- 

 decayed leaves and branches form a bed in which the seedling after germination 

 cannot take root, but on the railway banks and other exposed surfaces not overgrown 

 by dense grass young seedlings appeared and grew freely. Many of these trees had 

 large climbers, such as Vitis Coignetiae, Schizophragma, and Wistaria, growing nearly 

 to their tops. Plate 38, taken from a negative kindly given me by the Japanese 

 Imperial Forest Department, shows the appearance of this forest. Plate 39 a, from 

 the same source, shows a mature forest of Cryptomeria in the island of Shikoku. 

 Plate 39 B shows the trunk of the tree and the manner of felling still adopted in 

 Japan, cf. p. 137. 



The forester told me that the system adopted in this forest, now that it is 



* Mayr quotes Dr. Honda for the fact that the most southern locality where it grows wild is in the island of Yakushima, 

 the northernmost of the Riu-Kiu islands, where in a dense forest at a high elevation it forms immense trunks. 



